Liner notes

From the early days of vinyl records

Astrud Gilberto has laughing eyes and when she sings, you’ll ‘hear’ them. For Astrud is that rara avis – the human vocal realisation of the dreamlike quality all men and women seek endlessly in their romantic notions and in their unsatisfied longings… Her singing projects shimmering images, like slow motion love-making, and whether she makes you feel ‘with it’ or ‘on top of it’ or drowned in the emotion of it, she saturates and satisfies. – Astrud Gilberto’s The Girl From Ipanema, 1960

A lot of people are born slightly cross-eyed. Or slightly red-faced. Or slightly ugly. Anita Kerr wasn’t one of these. Anita Kerr was born Slightly Baroque. ‘Baroque’ does not rhyme with ‘barbecue’. If you think it does, or even might, you are seriously ineligible to touch this album. – Anita Kerr’s Slightly Baroque LP, 1966

The Orchestra: always looking bored, as if they’d really rather be home watching Mr Ed re-runs. The arranger asks the trumpets if they can blow into their stands to get more of an organ sound. The third trumpet replies, in a tone like you’d hear from Wrigley if you’d asked him if he could spare a stick of gum, ‘I think so.’ Like a convention of movie extras, they seem to be practicing some sort of East Indian unbugability. – Dean Martin’s Hits Again LP, 1965

‘How should I sing this?’ ‘Like a 16-year-old girl who’s been dating a 40-year-old man, but it’s all over now’... Five foot three and tiger eyes. A mouth made for lollipops or kisses… The power to exalt, or to destroy, wanting only the former, but unafraid to invoke the latter if the time comes. Unafraid to pull on the boots again, toss out a burnt-out thing with a casual ‘So long, babe’ and get. – Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots are Made for Walking LP, 1966

Famously bad

By Steve ‘Short’ Packer

THE TITLE of a classic movie puts 'the bad’ between 'the good’ and 'the ugly’, which is where you find Murder on the High Cs: Original recordings 1937-1951, by Florence Foster Jenkins and Friends. In Amazon’s sales rankings, the CD, released in 2003, was recently struggling to hold on to a spot around 150,000. But who’s counting? Murder on the High Cs’ very existence is proof that some appreciation of the gloriously bad survives in a world based on the assumption that everyone wants the best of everything. When 'Madame Jenkins' strutted her operatic stuff all those years ago, opinions varied. To some, the buxom, wealthy socialite was simply unlistenable. To others, she was delightfully hilarious. Her concert at Carnegie Hall in 1944 was New York’s ‘night of the year’, with tickets scalped at ridiculous prices – to Noel Coward among others. The only previously available Jenkins recording was the 1962 RCA album The Glory (????) of the Human Voice (reissued on CD in 1992). It immediately converted David Bowie when he heard it at a party in the 1970s. “She would grace the New York set with this monstrous voice once or twice a year with private recitals at the Ritz-Carlton. Be afraid, be very afraid,” Bowie said when listing 25 of his most prized vinyl records for Vanity Fair in 2002. Absent from the list was the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, although Bowie must have been tempted. Maybe he thought it was enough to recommend one artist whose fame came from being dreadful. Bowie first came across ‘The Ledge’ in the late 1960s when signing to a United States record company which supplied him with a stack of singles by its other artists. His favourite was the The Ledge’s debut single, Paralyzed – a bizarre and probably unprecedented blast of amateur abandon – and Bowie paid tribute when he came up with the name for his Ziggy Stardust persona. The Ledge was born Norman Carl Odam in Lubbock, Texas, in 1947. As a boy, he tormented family and friends with an obsession for making strange vocal effects. In 1968 he headed for New York with high hopes, inspired by seeing Tiny Tim performing Tip-Toe Thru’ the Tulips on television. Within days, two vacuum cleaner salesmen heard him busking and took him around the corner to a friend’s studio, where they cut Paralyzed. The recording has featured in many ‘worst of all time’ radio polls, partly because most listeners wouldn’t have heard The Ledge’s other songs. They include I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship, which Bowie covered on his 2002 album Heathen. Ordination by a cultural guru of Bowie’s standing elevates the likes of Jenkins and Odam to the level of trash aesthetics. It would be easy to dismiss the ‘so bad it’s good’ appeal as chic irony that quickly wears thin. But genuine ‘anti-genius’ has other attractions. Such artists, often described as primitive, naïve or merely devoid of talent, can be seen as striking a blow against trendiness, mainstream mediocrity and the conceits of professionalism. They literally speak volumes about stepping out and giving it a go with whatever talent you have. Or think you have. It could also be argued that they help us laugh at the eternal, potentially tragic gulf between human aspirations and human shortcomings. A feature of the famously bad is a lack of irony about themselves. They tend to have generous natures and a sincerity that makes them hard to dislike. They also have the eccentricity or bluster not to care what anyone else thinks. In her own mind, Madame Jenkins was a great diva and not a parody of one. Even when she got carried away and not only threw flowers into the rapturous audience, but threw the flower basket after them. So there you go: Florence Foster Jenkins and the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. If you’re goingto have the worst, you may as well have the best of it.

'Murder on the High Cs’ very existence is proof that some appreciation of the gloriously bad survives in a world based on the assumption that everyone wants the best of everything.'